The long road from Mandalay

John Preston reviews From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe

By John Preston

12:00AM BST 07 Apr 2002

IN 1988, THE Cambridge don, John Casey, was in the Burmese capital, Mandalay, when he heard about a waiter at a local Chinese restaurant who was a great James Joyce enthusiast. To Casey's surprise, the waiter turned out not to be an elderly Chinese - as he had supposed - but a young hill tribesman called Pascal Khoo Thwe, who had stumbled across the works of Joyce by accident.

Although he had never heard of Jane Austen or T. S. Eliot, Pascal had, Casey discovered, a real understanding of the humour and irony of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was the start of a friendship which led to Casey helping Pascal to escape the Burmese military junta, and to become a student of English literature at Cambridge - and indirectly to this remarkable autobiographical account of Pascal's life to date.

He grew up in the Padaung tribe where the women were famous for their "giraffe-necks", produced by their wearing neck rings from the age of five onwards - as they grew older, more rings were added. His grandmother, who had a 14-inch neck, was exhibited for a time as a freak in Bertram Mills circus. Since the Padaungs had no concept of freakishness, she was perfectly happy - if somewhat bemused - to be displayed to the gawping crowds.

It was - on the surface at least - a peaceable, idyllic, pre-industrial society, with no televisions, no telephones and hardly any cars. The few planes belonging to Royal Burma Airlines were in such a ropy state that passengers were advised to bring along umbrellas - to use inside the airplane if it looked like rain.

But outside Pascal's village, Burma was becoming more and more repressive under the military regime of General Ne Win. Pascal, however, had no political affiliations; all he wanted to do was be a Roman Catholic priest. It was while studying at Mandalay University that he became aware that all was not well - dissidents were being arrested, demonstrations ruthlessly suppressed, students who dared to question their teachers were packed off for hard labour. A girl he fell in love with, Moe, was first gang-raped by soldiers - and then, two weeks later, murdered whilst being held in detention.

The idyll was over. Pascal decided he could no longer stand and watch. He organised protests and addressed meetings, before going on the run - leaving university as well as the part-time job in the Chinese restaurant where he had met Casey. About to flee into the jungle pursued by the military, he decided that he too, like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist would follow a policy of "silence and cunning" - only realising later that what Joyce had actually written was "silence, exile and cunning".

Covered in mud to disguise himself, he wandered through burned-out villages and farms, seeing decomposing bodies swinging from the trees, and living off stray dogs and any other animals he could kill. Eventually, he joined up with a group of rebels on the Thai/Burmese border who were launching guerrilla raids on government troops.

And it was there, in the middle of the jungle, that he received a letter from John Casey telling him - to his astonishment - that he had been offered a place by Caius College in Cambridge. "For a delirious hour I danced alone in the Burmese jungle with my MI6."

Immediately afterwards, though, he was assailed by doubts. Would it not be an act of of "terrible egoism" to abandon his colleagues? They, however, persuaded him that he would be mad not to go - and so he arrives in London, barely able to speak English, culturally shell-shocked and full of misgivings. However, by dint of great determination and encouragement, he wins through in the end, becoming the first-ever Burmese to gain an honours degree in literature at Cambridge.

This would be an extraordinary story irrespective of how it was written. But what gives it particular resonance is the beauty of its prose: rich, vivid and never - or scarcely ever - cloying. Pascal strikes an instinctively fine balance between writing about himself and the people around him. About himself, he is funny, perceptive and free from any hint of self-aggrandisement. About others - and about Burma - he often veers towards sadness, even despair. Yet, despite ample provocation, he never loses his sense of humanity; always seeing through the barbarism to the frailty - and folly - beneath.

The result is a marvellous book, full of pity, yearning and wisdom; stirring and terrible in equal measure. I commend it wholeheartedly.